The artist Torreya Cummings from San Francisco arranged her actors like a scene from the movie " Destry Rides Again". When the people are in the correct position they have to stay in it. The performance is over as soon as the first actor is losing its position. San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, June 28, 2012.

Photo: Sonja Och, The Chronicle

The artist Torreya Cummings from San Francisco arranged her actors...

Image 2 of 3

The money Torreya Cummings, an artist from San Francisco, used for her performance 'Destry Rides Again, Again" in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, June 28, 2012.

Photo: Sonja Och, The Chronicle

The money Torreya Cummings, an artist from San Francisco, used for...

Image 3 of 3

"Fresh Paint" the show of acrylic sculpture at TrueSilver Gallery will be deconstructed into bits on Sunday.

The minute Leah Rosenberg takes a hole punch to her art and invites attendees to join in Saturday, they'll know why her show, "Fresh Paint," was not right for a commercial gallery.

No gallery owner wants to see the product for sale reduced to round flakes on the floor. But Charlie and Heather Villyard, owners of TrueSilver Gallery, will be right there punching away. They aren't too worried about overhead because the gallery is in their home, in Noe Valley.

Despite the climb to get there, residential parking and no regular hours, Villyard estimates that 1,500 visitors have been to TrueSilver in the three years since the opening show - their own wedding. They do four to six shows a year, and charge a 30 percent commission, as opposed to 50-50 at a commercial gallery. They've sold four paintings from "Fresh Paint," and if a 30 percent cut seems high, it isn't.

"Historically we've ended up giving all proceeds to the artist," says Villyard, whose day job is as executive director of ArtSpan, which produces SF Open Studios. "Exhibition space is pretty hard to come by in San Francisco, and seeing art in a home sparks budding collectors' enthusiasm because they see it in a space they can relate to."

There might be five or 10 San Francisco home galleries with regular curatorial schedules. In June there were one-night installations in 20 homes on 20 consecutive nights.

Galleries' limitations

"What's becoming increasingly clear in the 21st century is that museums and galleries can only do a certain kind of art, and many artists are interested in getting out of that white box and into the world," says Renny Pritikin, who was among those gathered in the TrueSilver for night 17 of the 20-night barnstorm called the Southern Machine Exposure Project.

Pritikin is director of the Nelson Museum and Fine Arts Collection at UC Davis, but what he has come to see on this night is not collectible. It involves nine people in saloon costumes freezing into a tableau vivant for Torreya Cummings' piece "Destry Rides Again, Again," the title taken from the 1939 Western.

Cummings, who is 35 and lives in Emeryville, was on a double bill with a complicated drama involving poetry, puppetry and computer imagery by Emily Auble and Miriam Jones, both based in Los Angeles. The event was planned as a cultural exchange between the artists from here and there because it was co-sponsored by Southern Exposure, a nonprofit center for visual arts in the Mission District, and Machine Project, a similar organization with a storefront in Los Angeles' Echo Park. "We think of this as a triple blind date," says Mark Allen of Machine Project. "There are the San Francisco artists, the L.A. artists, then the hosts' houses."

Witness to the blind date were 80 strangers pressed into the Villyards' living room, which was originally a bakery storefront. Attendance was free but by reservation. Audience members had their names checked off at the door. It was standing room only because there was one couch and it was taken.

'The magic'

"For me the magic comes from being in someone's house. It's a different context completely," says Melissa Wyman, who had driven down from Sebastopol for the event. "You're actually entering someone's home. There is less of what you have come to expect in a gallery space."

A piano started tinkling to signal the beginning of "Destry Rides Again, Again." All the women were dressed as cowboys and the men as bar girls in frilly dresses. The director, Cummings, put them all in place, which included a man made up as Marlene Dietrich, lying facedown on the hardwood floor, with one leg contorted up and another man in drag sitting on his back.

Cummings turned on the spotlight and the room went quiet. The actors froze and so did the people in the audience, to respect the tableau tradition. In the first act the positions were held for five minutes, and in the second act it stretched to eight minutes. "What was amazing for me was that it wasn't boring for a second. If it's too short it's a tease. Too long and it's boring," says Pritikin, satisfied despite the discomforts of having to stand perfectly still himself for five and then eight minutes, and that's after the hassle of getting there.

'Unforgettable'

"It can be off-putting, trying to park and find the place, nowhere to sit, no amenities. But if it is right, and I think this was right, it can be an unforgettable experience of community and ideas."

In addition to having no place to sit, there was no place to lean, because "Fresh Paint," Leah Rosenberg's acrylic paint-based sculpture, was on the walls and in the corners.

‌

Because there is no organized opening night for home galleries, as there is for commercial galleries, artists have to come up with their own attractions. For hers, Rosenberg, 33, the head pastry chef at the Blue Bottle Cafe at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, baked 2-foot-tall layer cakes and placed them on pedestals. Then she cut into each cake to reveal that its cross section was the same as the painting on the wall. That's an effect best realized in a private home. In all, maybe 100 people came through for the opening.

Asked whether this is the perfect setting for her work, Rosenberg responds: "The Guggenheim would be the perfect setting." But absent that, a living room comes close.

'Where they live'

"More than at a commercial gallery, you get to host people when the exhibition takes place in a home," says Rosenberg, who has now done solo shows in two San Francisco residences. "I'm inclined to intervene in the space because it is where they live."

Her closing intervention starts at 6 p.m. Saturday. She'll climb a ladder and cut down two large paintings. Then she'll issue a hole punch to each person there, and give them a portion of painting to punch on and a plate to capture the punchings. These will become a separate art piece for sale by weight. Confetti by the ounce, $10, labor included.